Private Insurers Profit by Ripping Off Medicare

New research by health care experts concludes that privately run insurance plans designed to supplement the Medicare system serve no truly useful purpose and instead of helping seniors receive better care, Medicare Advantage plans actually undermine traditional Medicare’s fiscal health.

By creating conditions where Medicare is overpaying premiums to these private (mostly for-profit) programs, the report—to be published in the forthcoming issue of International Journal of Health Services—found that as much as $282.6 billion dollars has been drained from Medicare since they were first introduced in 1985.

A majority of that waste, however, has been lost in the last eight years, the report says, following changes enacted under the Bush administration in 2003 which boosted Medicare payments to private insurers to nearly $85 billion through 2012. Those billions of dollars have taken a heavy toll on taxpayers, seniors, and ultimately—given the well-known impact of rising national health care costs—have helped drag down the entire US economy.

“In 2012 alone, private insurers are being overpaid $34.1 billion, or $2,526 per Medicare Advantage enrollee,” said Dr. Ida Hellander, lead author of the study.

Concluding that the creation of the private programs and subsequent attempts to reform or modify them have all been fiscal failures, co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said: “It’s time we look to proven, cost-effective ways of providing high-quality care to Medicare’s beneficiaries and to the entire population. That means taking a fresh look at the single-payer model of reform.”

The research, which the authors suggest is the first of its kind, comes at a time when lawmakers in Washington, including vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, have proposed a dramatic expansion of private Medicare plans and criticized the Obama administration for the modest cuts in the overpayments contained in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the administration has also touted the fact that private plans are on the upswing and supports the basic continuation of the public-private partnership.

The report concludes that private insurers profit from Medicare in five basic ways, including: cherry-picking healthier seniors and making it harder for riskier patients to join programs; gaming Medicare’s so-called “risk-adjustment’ schemes; lobbying Congress for mandated payment structures; creating bonus payments schemes that generate no useful improvements in care; and by duplicating payments demands for care never even given by the plan.

“We’ve long known that Medicare has been paying private insurers more than if their enrollees had stayed in traditional free-for-service Medicare, but no one has assessed the full extent of these overpayments,” said Hellander. “Nor has anyone systematically examined the many ways that private insurers have gamed the system to maximize their bottom line at taxpayers’ expense.”

Woolhandler concluded: “It’s clear that having Medicare Advantage programs compete with Medicare doesn’t save us money. In fact the opposite is the case. The private plans only add waste, and the aggregate waste is staggering – enough to be a significant drag on the economy.”

“Unfortunately, recent legislative and technical attempts to reduce Medicare’s overpayments to these insurance firms have had little or no impact,” she said.

1 Comment

John Barkeron October 14, 2012 at 1:08 pm

Its about time Medicare Advantage Plans (MAPs) are made to compete on a level playing field and are exposed for what they are. MAPs are a Republican privatization scheme that has had remarkable success. Seniors are enticed into these plans by perks subsidized at the expense of regular Medicare recipients. About 27% of seniors are enrolled in these plans and that means that 27% of Medicare is 100% privatized. When that gets to 51% it is essentially over for Medicare as we know it. There is no way that competition between health care profiteers will lower the cost of health care. It does not work, health care in U. S. costs twice as much as it does in single payer countries. Does that sound like the Republican idea of competition is working? What MAPS will do is cherry pick healthy seniors and leave the needy in regular medicare running up the costs of Medicare. Republicians then will claim that the government run system is inefficient, costly and should be ended which is exactly what they have had in mind since Medicare was enacted. We will be back to square one with every one under the thumb of health care profiteers.